Advertisers want to know that when they pay for a video ad on YouTube or elsewhere across the web, that the advertisement can actually be seen by viewers. A lot can effect an ad being seen, such as the viewer never scrolling to the part of the page where the ad is placed, or users simply scrolling past the ad too quickly to really catch a glimpse. Taking a look into these things, Google recently published the results of a study identifying the “5 factors of viewability,” or, in other words, the things that impact the chance of a video ad being seen.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube and Google’s video ad strategy seems to be strong compared to the rest of the web…

Lightbox – the scalable multimedia ads that Google first introduced to the desktop back in 2012 and finally brought to mobile devices in September of this year – are now available to all AdWords advertisers globally.

The Lightbox format allows advertisers to quickly and easily combine existing video, images and maps in an HTML5 ad that will scale correctly for all standard ad sizes and devices. Hovering over the ad expands them to full-size no matter what the device … expand full story